February 23, 1992

Sailing Over The Edge

By WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

OUTERBRIDGE REACH
By Robert Stone.

obert Stone's fiction has always been preoccupied with the unlovely underside of American life. Eighteen years ago, soon after the conclusion
of the Vietnam War, he published his second novel, "Dog Soldiers," a book that made connections between folly and violence in Southeast Asia and countercultural disorders back home in the Age of Aquarius. "Dog Soldiers"
won the National Book Award, and with good reason. It spoke to American disenchantment, it was a compellingly executed tale of action, and the witty brilliance of its prose created a dark comedy of disaster -- of attempted heroic gestures
that were also, as its unheroic hero, John Converse, observed, "peculiar and stupid."

Nothing in the novels that followed it -- "A Flag for Sunrise" (1981) and "Children of Light" (1986) -- suggested that Mr. Stone had embraced a more "balanced" view of the world; indeed, when talking about his vision of things,
balance seemed hardly the word to use. But his latest novel, "Outerbridge Reach" -- which, like "Dog Soldiers," centers on a triangle of husband, wife and friend who is also betrayer, and which frequently alludes to
Vietnam as a gathering focus of troubled memories -- also brings a new possibility into the novelist's work: that not to believe in anything, to see through everything, may be a peculiarly stupid way to cheat oneself of life.

In "Outerbridge Reach" the Converse figure, much cleaned up, is a handsome fortyish husband and father named Owen Browne. A 1968 graduate of the Naval Academy who served in Vietnam, Browne uses no drugs and drinks very sparingly, reads, keeps
himself fit and tries to be a good man around the house. Soon after we meet him, he thinks about the morning he left Penn Station bound for Annapolis and wonders how the Owen Browne of those days might have imagined himself 20 years later:
"The image would have been a romantic one, but romantic in the postwar modernist style. Its heroic quality would have been salted in stoicism and ennobled by alienation. As an uncritical reader of Hemingway, he would have imagined
his future self suitably disillusioned and world-weary." The trouble is that Browne has become an unsatisfactory parody of that disillusioned figure, since his work consists of writing advertising copy for Altan Marine, a yacht brokerage
firm in Connecticut. (One thinks of lines from Robert Lowell's poem about his father, "Commander Lowell": " 'Anchors aweigh,' Daddy boomed in his bathtub. . . . When Lever Brothers offered to pay / him double
what the Navy paid.")

The Hylan Corporation, the parent company of Browne's firm, has planned to advertise its boats by having its head man, Matty Hylan, sail one of them around the world by himself in a highly publicized race. When Hylan, a buccaneering entrepreneur,
disappears amid evidence of financial disarray, Browne decides that he will enter the race in Hylan's place, even though his solo sailing experience is limited. His wife, Anne (who works for a sailing magazine, is handsome and tends
to drink too much), perceives that her husband has been mourning an unrealized dream and sees the race as an opportunity to move their marriage onto a new track -- so she resists her fears that the venture is really a desperate one. For
all their self-doubts, both she and Browne are idealists, unwilling to believe that the advice Browne later enters into his log of the race -- "Be true to the dreams of your youth" -- is really a fool's counsel.

INTO their orbit comes a documentary film maker named Ron Strickland, hired by the Hylan Corporation to make a movie about its entry in the race. Strickland prides himself on his lack of illusions, his way of penetrating to the false heart of every plausible
or pretentious human affirmation; his business is to expose ideals as trumpery, to exploit "the difference between what people say they're doing and what's really going on." In what he sees as the All-American marriage
of the Brownes, Strickland finds a rich subject for exposure; and since "almost all the attractive women Strickland knew had been to bed with him," Anne Browne is of special interest.

The novel divides almost exactly in half, with its first part patiently interweaving the narratives of Browne, Anne and Strickland, placing these principals in relation to a number of strongly presented subsidiary characters -- particularly Strickland's
sometime companion, Pamela, a prostitute ("ho" as she calls herself) and drug user who starred in one of his earlier documentaries: "Her eyes were a caution, warning away the faint of loin, the troubled and the poor."
In Part Two, the race begins and we move back and forth between the tumultuous course of Browne's voyage and the equally vivid and self-destructive course of Anne's affair with Strickland.

The novel's movement is leisurely, but the narrative has shapeliness and great cumulative power. The source of that power -- and pleasure -- is, of course, Mr. Stone's language as it creates a style. On every page something verbally interesting
happens: the insolent voice of a Hylan executive "suggested gulls over India Wharf"; Strickland's 1963 Porsche has rusty fittings, "but the engine reported like a Prussian soldier on the first turn of the key."
Captain Riggs-Bowen, club secretary of the Southchester Yacht Club (where a publicity party for the race is held) "had a brick-red blood-pressure mask around his eyes, which resembled those of a raptor." Anne's father, who
disapproves of Browne, calls the sea a desert ("Nothing out there but social cripples and the odd Filipino"), while his 60-year-old secretary, Antoinette Lamattina, looks "as though she thrived on chaste bereavement, frequent
communion and the occasional excursion to Roseland Ballroom." As with Mr. Stone's earlier books, there's an edge to the gritty idiom of description and dialogue that makes us think of Hemingway, certainly, but also of Raymond
Chandler. In fact, "Outerbridge Reach" is like a thriller in that we're made to care intensely about what happens next and who's going to get hurt.

Mr. Stone's novels are always heavily allusive, to previous books and styles as well as to places and their names. This one about the sea contains, among many others, references to "Moby-Dick" and "Billy Budd" (Browne is the Handsome
Sailor, thinks Strickland ironically); moments from "Richard III" ("What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What ugly sights of death," thinks Browne), as well as "Henry V" and "Romeo and Juliet";
lines from Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," Henley's "Invictus," Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge" and even John Gillespie Magee's "High Flight" ("I have slipped the surly bonds
of earth / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings").

The allusion needn't be explicit and isn't inevitably ironic or parodic. When Browne, on the voyage, recovers from what at first looked like a case of tetanus, he cooks himself a cheese omelet with fried ham that tastes "marvelous,"
"as things did at sea" -- and as those canned pork and beans and canned apricots tasted to Nick Adams on the fishing trip in "Big Two-Hearted River." As for the spirit of places, the novel is full of New York City (Mr.
Stone grew up there, but New York has been largely absent from his books), from Penn Station to Staten Island to the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as more exotic neighboring spots like Atlantic City, Bayonne, Port Newark, the Arthur Kill and
the Outerbridge Reach of the title.

AT a key moment early in the book, Browne, on an impulse, takes out the Parsifal II, a boat from the Altan repair yard on Staten Island, and comes upon a salvage yard where the hulks of old tugs and ferries rot in ominous peace. (The moment recalls an
eerily memorable one in "The Best Years of Our Lives" when Dana Andrews walks among disused aircraft.) The yard belongs to Anne's father and is an unlikely scene for a quest:

"On Browne's left, the hulks lay scattered in a geometry of shadows. The busy sheer and curve of their shapes and the perfect stillness of the water made them appear held fast in some phantom disaster. Across the Kill, bulbous storage tanks,
generators and floodlit power lines stretched to the end of darkness. The place was marked on the charts as Outerbridge Reach."

My reading of the novel says that the phantom disaster in which Browne later involves himself also involves a discovery -- which his wife and Strickland also make -- that Outerbridge Reach reaches further and deeper than anyone could have thought. So
when, deep in the Southern Hemisphere, he sees an iceberg, it appears to him as a steam tug, "like the ones his father-in-law owned at Outerbridge Reach." And as, in relentless succession, he confronts high winds, freezing rain
and the second-rate qualities of his unworthily built boat -- "plastic unmaking itself" -- Browne understands at last that he is "about to experience the true dimensions of the situation in which he had placed himself."

At any rate, it's impossible to read the final, dazzling hundred pages of the novel without feeling that something terrible has happened for which nobody is to blame. Alone at sea, Browne muses that "it was necessary to experience life correctly
but at the same time compose it into something acceptable." (Melville may have had a similar notion when he attached the motto "Keep True to the Dreams of Thy Youth" to his writing desk.) Robert Stone's blend of heroic
aspiration and mordantly deflationary irony results in something like tragicomedy -- maybe even something like Shakespeare, our best tragic comedian. But whatever you call it, "Outerbridge Reach" seems to me a triumph -- a beautifully
and painstakingly composed piece of literary art.

MISERY COMES ABOARD

In midafternoon, he sighted an island off his starboard bow that was black but inlaid with a deep delicious green, a festive sight in the glare. A hill rose from it to a height he reckoned at four hundred meters. Referring to the Admiralty sailing guide,
he decided it was the Cape Verdean island of Boa Vista. Later, a little boat painted in violent African colors went across his bow at a distance of a mile or so. Through binoculars he could make out a shirtless brown man with a red bandana
across his head standing behind the wheelhouse. The boat seemed top-heavy and tossed alarmingly in the mild sea. The name
Sao Martin da Porres
was stenciled across its stern.

At four o'clock, the marine operator broadcast a roll call of the entries. The stars of the race, the big boats, were already closing on Cape Agulhas. Browne's competition was spread westward over several hundred miles. Of the lot, only Preston
Fowler was ahead of him, clearing the equatorial doldrums at about latitude 11 south. When the broadcast ended, a weather fax arrived announcing a tropical depression off the horn of Brazil.

Boa Vista passed out of sight before sunset. The moment the sun was down, equatorial darkness closed around him, black on black under the cold stars. Worried about the current and his proximity to land, he stayed late on deck. His mind's eye refused
to give up the image of the black and green island. Finally he played the game of refusing the image, trying to force it from his imagination. Eventually he nodded off to sleep. Awakening with an odd but familiar sensation, he discovered
himself in tears. The same thing had been happening all the way across the Atlantic. It was strange because his easting had been a particularly invigorating run, spinnaker set and westerlies across the port quarter at 17 knots. Brilliant
autumn weather. But night after night he would go to sleep in perfectly good spirits and wake to feel some old misery slinking away with an unremembered dream. --
From "Outerbridge Reach."